How to Create Multiple Custom Fields in Salesforce?

Creating multiple custom fields in Salesforce orgs can be a challenging task. Let’s have a look at some of the biggest challenges faced by salesforce admins and developers in creating multiple salesforce fields.

• Time-consuming process: Creating bulk custom fields in Salesforce can be a time-consuming task for Salesforce admins. Manually creating multiple fields one by one can take up a significant amount of time and effort.
• Complexity and potential errors: The process of creating custom fields in Salesforce requires careful consideration of various parameters such as field type, data type, validation rules, picklist values, and dependencies. Managing all these details for a large number of fields increases the likelihood of errors and can be challenging to handle.
• Limited automation options: Salesforce provides limited out-of-the-box automation options for bulk field creation. Administrators often have to resort to manual workarounds or external tools to automate the process, which can be cumbersome and may require technical expertise.
• Limited visibility and tracking: Tracking the creation of bulk custom fields in Salesforce can be difficult without proper documentation or a centralized system. This lack of visibility can lead to confusion, duplicate fields, or inconsistent field naming conventions.
• Difficulty in managing dependencies: Custom fields in Salesforce can have dependencies on other fields, such as formula fields or validation rules. Managing these dependencies and ensuring their accuracy while creating bulk custom fields can be a complex task for administrators.

Idea:
During an application development or Org to Org migration, user needs to create custom fields of different data types in various standard & custom objects. In order to create single field, user needs to follow a 5-step process which generally takes around 1 min

If user has to create 200-500 fields, it can take hours of hours to handle this time-consuming & a monotonous job for Salesforce developers & admins.

Solution:
Bulk Object Field Creator (BOFC) is a native force.com application designed to help overcome the above situation. BOFC application can create any number of custom fields of different field types, in just few simple steps in one single go.

BOFC can easily create multiple fields for multiple objects by:

• Importing Custom Fields of Standard/Custom Object directly from External Salesforce Org
• Importing CSV or XLS or XLSX file of fields in Salesforce
• Manually adding fields in bulk for different field types

It can also help you in managing Salesforce org configuration using just a few clicks. This would help users save time, reduce manual effort and increase productivity. BOFC application has a simple user interface which is extremely self-explanatory and easy to use.

Major Features for Bulk Field Creation includes:

• Can Create fields for Multiple objects at the same time.
• Can Drag Drop a CSV or XLS or XLSX files to import fields
• Can import custom fields from External salesforce org
• Can Assign field permission for multiple profiles / permission sets
• Can Assign newly created fields to multiple layouts
• Can create multiple types of fields at the same time in a single go.
• Can create the Global Picklist automatically when pick list type fields are imported from External Org

Steps to Create Multiple Fields in Multiple Objects:

1. Click App Launcher & open BOFC “Bulk Field Creation” page

2. Select single or multiple objects (user can select any kind of object standard or custom or both)

3. User can select single or multiple (Profiles or Permission Sets or both) to assign field permissions and can select single or multiple layouts to assign newly created fields

Profile & Layout selection

Permission-Sets selection

4. User can add rows of multiple fields in three ways. Let’s review all the above ways one by one:

Option 1: Manually Add New Rows – User can add any number of rows of any field type by using this option.

Option 2: Import fields from External Salesforce org– User can import custom fields of any kind of object (Standard/Custom/Managed) from any external Salesforce org (Production/Sandbox/Developer)

It will open the below popup to select source org information

Above image has few features (each number has its description as below):

1. 1. Select the Source Org from where the fields needs to be imported
   2. Enter the API name of the Source Object & Click Fetch Custom Fields
   3. Select single or multiple custom fields
   4. If any selected fields of type picklist is referencing any global picklist, then BOFC can import global picklist along with Field.
   5. Click this button to import selected fields from Source Org.

Option 3: Import using CSV / XLS: In this option, user can import set of fields using CSV or XLS sheet. The sheet should in the proper format and can easily import any number of fields (Refer: Sample Template)

5. Once rows are added in the table using any of the above discussed options, the field creation screen will look like below:

• Above image has some features (each number has its description as below):

1. 1. Select rows which needs to be created as new fields in Salesforce
   2. User can modify field type (if required).
   3. User can choose Object name (same or different) on all rows.
   4. Click “Create New Fields” button to create fields in Salesforce
   5. Click “Delete Rows” to delete any unwanted rows.
   6. Pagination – This page has a pagination if count of fields is more than 80. Each page shows 80 fields. User can use “>” or “<” or “<<” or “>>” buttons to navigate on other pages.
   7. Counts:
      • Max no of fields – 80 – Each page shows 80 fields
      • Total no of rows – Number of rows added in table to create new fields
      • Total no of rows (selected) – Count of rows selected to create new fields

6. Select your rows & verify all the details in required columns or remove error (if any).

Click “Create New Fields” button to add newly fields to a selected objects. Once this button is clicked, it will show a popup for all the actions and their status.

7. Also, it will show “Success or Error” status message in-front of each row.

• • Green means – Row created successfully as field, assigned field permissions to profiles & assigned to layouts
  • Red means – Row error out with some error message

Note:

To avail this feature, kindly make sure you have installed the latest version of the application. You can upgrade your package using either of two ways:

1. In Salesforce, go to “BOFC Home > Settings > App Version > Click to Upgrade”— or —
2. Refer to the mentioned link to quickly upgrade your package to the latest version and explore its complete benefits:
   https://www.bofc.io/release-notes/